If you know French, Chantraine's Grammaire Homérique vol 2 has a good treatment (the chapter is called "prépositions et préverbes", i.e. he doesn't make so much of a difference whether they are tied to a head word or whether they're freestanding). It'll be just Homeric Greek of course.

Paul Derouda wrote:If you know French, Chantraine's Grammaire Homérique vol 2 has a good treatment (the chapter is called "prépositions et préverbes", i.e. he doesn't make so much of a difference whether they are tied to a head word or whether they're freestanding). It'll be just Homeric Greek of course.

Thanks very much for the suggestion but my French is no more than half forgotten fragments from school.

I thought that Smyth's sections 1636 onwards are rather detailed and all-encompassing,and you've got LSJ's treatment of each preposition to supplement that.

If all prefixes are formed from prepositions and the meaning of the prefix is entirely predictable from the meaning of the preposition then yes Smyth does indeed provide the necessary information.

I still would be interested in a full treatment focused on prefixes. Using the downloaded version I could not even find any mention that prepositions serve as prefixes and I do wonder if it can be that simple.

Nonetheless, it does seem that your suggestion provides exactly the info I seek, so thank you very much.

Well no, prepositions aren't the only things used as prefixes. But they do make up a large majority of the ones you will see.If I recall the Reading Greek course has a reasonably good section on word-building (I'm not absolutely certain that this is the source, as I only have a photocopied handout from a second-year Greek course & it doesn't have the title on it).

Honestly, I would expect textbooks and most reference grammars to have at least some discussion of word-building; you might also try books geared specifically towards vocabulary acquisition, although I can't make recommendations (the only book like this that I've used is one in German, which I doubt is what you're looking for)

Indeed you've got augments, alpha privative, things like δυσ- and ζα- (which may have originally been prepositions/adverbs.) I guess any compound word could be said to have a prefix. In the word (phrase?) τὄυνεκα, you would have to say that the article is functioning as a prefix.

Markos wrote:In the word (phrase?) τὄυνεκα, you would have to say that the article is functioning as a prefix.

No, not really, as I understand it. Prefixing is *not* an umbrella term for any combination of words or word parts to make a larger word.

With prefixing, you have a word fragment that can't stand alone (called a bound morpheme) which is added before a word root to make a new word. Many prefixes are derived from adverbs or prepositions, and they'll have a meaning which is in some way related, but they're not, strictly speaking, functioning as prepositions when used this way. (There is a grey area here, as any speaker of German will know or anyone familiar with the Homeric phenomenon of tmesis -- prefixes can go wandering and become separated from their verbs, but they're still not functioning as prepositions because they don't form a prepositional phrase)

In the case of compounding, you have two or more roots (lexemes, really; units that can serve as the basis for a word and which can be inflected or added to to create derivatives) that are being stuck together, sometimes in slightly modified form. Compounds may not be as productive as prefixes, and the meaning or relationship between the parts may not be as easy to predict.

τὄυνεκα is neither of the above. It's an example of a phrase (article + postposition) which has become fossilized and now functions as a single word. A lot of conjunctions are formed this way. One huge difference between something like this and prefixing is that the parts being combined still show inflection and follow the rules of prepositional phrases -- prefixes don't.

As for lists, there are quite a few spread all over books from what I've seen. Both Chatraine and the orange Homeric Grammar have a nice selection plus usage, as do most grammars it seems. I don't know how exhaustive they are, I think even some common ones like aneu were missing from the Oxford grammar. One of the monographs I found on Greek preps only lists the modern ones.